A heavily trafficked road in the Eastern Panhandle is going to expand to help drivers and commuters get to their destinations faster and safer.
The Berkeley Springs Bypass project will stretch a little more than three miles from south of Winchester Grade Road to Martinsburg Road in Morgan County.
This new road will allow vehicles to bypass US Route 522, which sees a current traffic volume of 13,400 vehicles per day. Approximately 30 percent of those vehicles are trucks, according to Gov. Jim Justice, who made the announcement over the weekend in Berkeley Springs.
“This project will alleviate traffic congestion, enhance safety, and increase roadway capacity along the US 522 corridor,” Justice said. “There’s a lot of people putting in a lot of good licks to make these things happen.”
The project is part of the governor’s Roads to Prosperity initiative, which is in its third year. The bond program has seen $1 billion in major infrastructure improvement projects to-date.
The contract for the new bypass project in Morgan County was awarded to the Trumbull Corp. with a bid of $59.8 million.
The project will create a four-lane highway with a diamond interchange at the intersection of West Virginia Route 9. It includes construction of three bridges – one mainline bridge and one overpass bridge – and three new at-grade intersections.
“This project is important for human safety,” said West Virginia Sen. Charlie Trump, R-Morgan, at the event. “It’s going to be a great project for Morgan County, and for the safety of the people of West Virginia and people from all over the United States who drive this highway.”
Another Morgan County lawmaker, West Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Pro Tempore Daryl Cowles, R-Morgan, was also at the event. Cowles said the new bypass will do more than make a safer highway.
“It’s great to have a safe highway, it’s great to have the trucks out of downtown [Berkley Springs] for the tourism industry, but let’s not forget that this will change people’s lives,” Cowles said. “It will lift and raise the boats of home budgets and the prosperity of regular citizens everyday.”
The eastern edge of the Eastern Panhandle, consisting of Morgan, Berkeley and Jefferson counties, has seen massive growth in population in the past decade. Berkeley County alone from 2010 to 2018 saw more than 1,500 new people each year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
But population growth also means heavier traffic and more upkeep of roads.
In an interview with West Virginia Public Broadcasting last year, the state Division of Highways said to adequately fund the state’s road needs, West Virginia would need at least $2.4 billion every year, which is twice what the state sees on average annually for road needs.
According to the state DOH, West Virginia has the sixth-largest transportation system in the country based on the number of miles of road in the state. The state has 36,000 miles of roadway largely maintained by the Division of Highways.
Only 14,000 miles of roadway in West Virginia are eligible for federal dollars, according to the DOH. The rest must come from state tax dollars like tolls, DMV fees and gasoline taxes.
In an emailed statement to West Virginia Public Broadcasting, Sandy Hamilton, the executive director of the development authority in Berkeley County – which is the county that neighbors Morgan and often feeds into Morgan’s traffic congestion – said the bypass project will benefit the entire Eastern Panhandle.
“The Berkeley Springs Bypass project benefits our entire region, and particularly from an economic development standpoint,” Hamilton said. “Infrastructure improvements of this magnitude enhance and encourage our ability to more effectively market our attributes.”
Virgin Hyperloop has selected West Virginia as the home for a $500 million certification center and test track for an innovative — but yet to be authorized by federal regulators — high-speed transportation system. The company, owned by billionaire Sir Richard Branson, announced Thursday that it will locate its new Hyperloop Certification Center on nearly 800 acres of land in the state.
The technology offers high-speed travel at speeds exceeding 600 miles per hour, using magnetic levitation. Passengers would travel in a fashion once only imagined in science fiction, in floating pods moving at speeds twice as fast as a commercial jet flight and four times faster than high speed rail.
Travel time between Pittsburgh and Chicago would be reduced to 41 minutes. Trips from New York City to Washington D.C. would take only a half hour.
Construction on the test track and certification center — which will sit on a former coal mine stretching across Grant and Tucker counties — is expected to break ground in the coming year, with safety certifications expected by 2025 and commercial launch by 2030.
The land, owned by Western Pocahontas Properties and located near Mt. Storm, is being donated to the West Virginia University Foundation in partnership with Hyperloop. WVU and Marshall University will both be involved in developing the project.
Virgin Hyperloop One
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A rendering of what the Hyperloop Certification Center is expected to look like upon completion.
Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson was joined virtually by John Chambers, a West Virginia native and former chairman of Cisco Systems, and U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao to make the announcement.
The company picked West Virginia after reviewing applications from 17 other states hoping to host the testing hub. West Virginia has been vying for the project for nearly a year, with officials from Virgin Hyperloop visiting West Virginia University in November last year.
“You took a risk on our state, my home state,” Chambers said to Branson in a video.
Branson congratulated Chambers and other West Virginians as the announcement was made.
“You put more than your best foot forward to try to sort of build an already fantastic innovation center in your state. It could make a big difference in the future,” Branson said.
The U.S. Department of Transportation will use the center and six-mile track to establish regulatory standards, while Virgin will run tests on the site. While the federal regulators have not yet authorized the Hyperloop, they recently laid out a framework for regulating such a means of travel.
“Hyperloop technology is one of the many new developments during this historic period of transportation,” Chao said in video. “This wave of innovation also includes drones, electric cars, autonomous vehicles, reusable rockets and quiet supersonic air travel.”
Top officials representing the state celebrated the announcement, including officials from government, business and higher education.
“For years, I have been saying that West Virginia is the best kept secret on the East Coast, and it’s true. Just look at this announcement and all it will bring to our state – investment, jobs, and tremendous growth,” Gov. Jim Justice said. “It’s a true honor and privilege to be selected as the site for the Hyperloop Certification Center and lead the nation in this next step forward for transportation.”
Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin took part in the virtual announcement.
“Virgin Hyperloop’s decision to make West Virginia the home of their Certification Center is a testament to our people and proves that when West Virginia competes, we win,” Joe Manchin said in a news release.
Republican U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito also echoed excitement over the project. Capito also took part in the virtual announcement.
“Over the last several years, West Virginia’s economy has begun to diversify into new sectors,” Capito said. “The announcement that Virgin Hyperloop’s Certification Center and test track will be located right here in our state will help us continue this growth in the knowledge-based economy. I’m glad that Virgin Hyperloop views West Virginia as a state on the edge of the tech economy.”
Virgin Hyperloop also has a research and development test track near Las Vegas, Nevada.
It wasn’t too long ago that Michael Farmer, a pastor in Charleston, West Virginia, received an email asking him a question that was already on his mind: “As a Black Southern Baptist pastor in West Virginia, what is my role in telling our stories?”
The email was from Ashton Marra, the managing digital editor of a news organization called 100 Days in Appalachia. Marra was inviting Farmer to be a part of a new project, the Appalachian Advisors Network.
“The Advisors Network is really three parts,” Marra said, “And the first part is a database of creators.” This way, Marra said, rather than national or international news outlets sending a journalist from New York City or Los Angeles to cover rural Appalachia, those same outlets could hire a freelance journalist rooted in those same communities, who could tell a more nuanced story.
“The second part is a resource guide,” Marra continued. That way, if those outlets insist on sending an outsider to write about Appalachia, at least that journalist can read a pamphlet or listen to a podcast on their flight in.
The third part, the one for which Marra was reaching out to Farmer, is meant to address a problem journalism industry insiders call “parachute journalism.”
“National media parachute into our region, tell stories about Appalachians that were predetermined. ‘I’m going to go into Appalachia and tell a story about a laid off coal miner who’s gonna vote for Trump.’ And nobody else’s stories [get] told,” Marra said.
To counter that, Marra and her colleagues assembled the Appalachian Advisors Network: a group of 14 Appalachian community leaders from Pennsylvania to Alabama who have agreed to help journalists gain more perspectives on the full diversity of the region.
The project launched in early September, 60 days before the presidential election, and has already fielded inquiries from outlets including PeopleMagazine. (Disclosure note: 100 Days in Appalachia is an occasional collaborator with the Ohio Valley ReSource, and distributes ReSource content.)
The Advisors Network is not the only new venture in Appalachian journalism making waves this election season. Investigative journalism outlet Mountain State Spotlight launched September with bombshell reporting on the coal empire of West Virginia’s billionaire Governor Jim Justice. In Pennsylvania, two college students are launching a student-run journal of Appalachian stories. And in Kentucky, an oral historian released a podcast documenting the lives of rural LGBTQ people across the country.
F. Brian Ferguson
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Mountain State Spotlight was founded to produce investigative journalism for West Virginians
Capital Concerns
It’s no coincidence we’re seeing a flurry of new journalism emerging out of Appalachia right now, said Penny Muse Abernathy, Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“I think what we’re seeing is the collapse of the for-profit model that sustained most local newspapers for 200 years,” she said.
Abernathy is the author of a new report laying bare the threats facing news outlets. Between 2004 and 2020, the report found, one in four newspapers closed or merged with another paper. Still more reduced their reporting staff, leaving what Muse-Abernathy called “ghost papers,” outlets that were still printing news, but lacked the staff or the resources to thoroughly report on the community.
Most of those papers were in communities that were in deep economic distress.
Newspapers die for a number of reasons, but the extinction event of the modern age is largely attributable to the decline of the ad-based for-profit model. For 200 years, Abernathy said, most newspapers relied on subscriptions from community members and on advertising from local businesses. Both those revenue streams have slowed to a trickle: According to the Pew Research Center, the number of people subscribed to a print or digital news outlet is at its lowest since 1940, the first year for which data is available, and ad revenue fell by 62 percent between 2008 and 2018. Of the $71 million spent on digital ad revenue (on all websites, not just news sites) in 2019, more than half went to just two companies: Google and Facebook.
Today, one out of every five journalists lives in New York, Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C., leaving many rural people in “news deserts,” communities where no journalists have their eye on the county executives or members of the local development board.
“When you lose a local newspaper, you lose a reporter who’s going to cover a local board of education meeting. The county commission meeting,” Abernathy said. “When you lose a regional newspaper, you lose reporters on those bigger beats like education and the environment, which impact thousands of people across a whole region.”
Abernathy believes the future of media lies in nonprofit journalism, outlets like nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica and networks like National Public Radio that get their funding from grants and individual donations.
Ken Ward Jr., a reporter at ProPublica and co-founder of Mountain State Spotlight, prefers to call it civic journalism.
“It harkens into all the other civic institutions we think of in our community, whether it’s a public library or a public school. An important part of civic life is news, is information about the issues that you and your neighbors are facing.”
With a staff of less than a dozen, Mountain State Spotlight is financed by individual donations, by foundations, and by ProPublica, which pays Ward’s salary.
Not a Monolith
The flurry of new nonprofit Appalachian journalism is not only motivated by pursuing new funding models, but by elevating the voices and perspectives of those who have not traditionally been represented in mainstream media.
“Country Queers is an ongoing multimedia oral history project that I founded in 2013,” said project founder Rae Garringer, who uses gender-neutral they/them pronouns, “Out of a pretty intense personal need to find and connect with other rural queer people.”
The Country Queers podcast, which is supported by crowdfunding, premiered this spring with an eight-episode season.
(Disclosure: Garringer is a former staff member at WMMT, a radio station that is a member of the Ohio Valley ReSource collaborative.)
Garringer isn’t sure they would consider Country Queers journalism, though the boundary of what does and doesn’t count as such can be imprecise. Rather, Garringer said Country Queers is “In the vein of cultural organizing around narrative shift, a cultural shift. To reclaim our history and our elders in these spaces, because of the way that systems have kept us from each other. The way that homophobia has kept us from each other.”
Another publication, the student-run Review of Appalachia, also aims to diversify whose voices get heard.
Friends and co-founders James Henderson and Jack Alex White are sophomores at the University of Virginia and Harvard University respectively. “Once you go to a college that’s a little further away or in an urban atmosphere, you get a little introspective about where you’re from,” said White, a first-generation college student from a coal-mining family.
“I have people in my family line who were illiterate, who couldn’t read,” White continued. “They clocked out at maybe a fourth, fifth-grade education. Brilliant people if you talked to them. People that contemplated the world, that had personal philosophies, that enjoyed consuming art, that were creative. And the rest of the world totally misses that, and opens and shuts the book at poverty, mostly white people, uneducated.”
Though the Review of Appalachia is new and has not yet published any work, Henderson and White hope the publication can be a journalistic or literary home for Appalachian young people who don’t want to have to leave their hometowns to express their intellect.
A similar interest motivates Michael Farmer, the Southern Baptist preacher who is a member of the Appalachian Advisors Network. “Many times, as an African American male in West Virginia, I’m considered to be the monolith for everybody in my community. And I have to pull back and say, I’m not that person. I just have one perspective. But I can give you that perspective, and there’s value in that perspective.”
Some West Virginia small businesses will soon have access to more than $10 million dollars; however, this comes after many businesses were denied relief funding in the early stages of the pandemic.
The West Virginia Economic Development Authority received $10.3 million in federal monies this week. The money will go into a “Revolving Loan Fund” — which is a self-replenishing fund that uses money from old loans to issue new loans. The fund is intended to help West Virginia small businesses impacted by the pandemic and related shutdowns, according to a Friday press release.
“Small businesses and entrepreneurs are the backbone of our economy and they need a helping hand during these difficult times,” U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin said. “This funding will give our businesses the assistance needed to get back on their feet and contribute to the state’s economy in the years to come as we recover from the virus.”
Under the federal definition, 86 percent of businesses in the state are considered small. Reporting by WVPB this spring found that many small businesses did not receive funding from pandemic-related federal relief packages, which included more than $600 billion in government- backed loans for small businesses nationwide.
The coronavirus has created an economic nightmare.
About a million jobs have disappeared in six months and more layoffs are likely this fall. In West Virginia, the pandemic doubled the state’s unemployment rate. That means 75,000 West Virginians are looking for work. Many of those searching for work are young people who’ve just graduated.
How are employers and educators dealing with this disruption? Are students redefining their hopes for the future? We’ll look at the training that can match workers with jobs.
For this episode, Us & Them host Trey Kay speaks with Dr. Sarah Armstrong Tucker, Chancellor of the West Virginia Community and Technical College System (CTCS) and Chancellor of the Higher Education Policy Commission. He also speaks with Brandon Dennison, Executive Director of Coalfield Development Corporation and Anthony Carnevale Director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
This episode of Us & Them is presented with support from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation and the West Virginia Humanities Council.
Subscribe to Us & Them on Apple Podcasts, NPR One, RadioPublic, Spotify, Stitcher and beyond. You also can listen to Us & Them on WVPB Radio — tune in on the fourth Thursday of every month at 8 p.m., with an encore presentation on the following Saturday at 3 p.m.
If someone had a crystal ball, they could tell you exactly what the future holds for Weirton. Sadly, there are no magic tools to make this a short story. But, with a bit of help from the gift of gab, I’ll tell you about the current trajectory of the area.
As it’s already been established, Weirton Steel offered a seemingly unbreakable backbone of employment, high wages, and community identity to the city and the nearby stretch of the Ohio Valley. The mill helped Weirton in countless ways, from building hospitals and libraries to plowing the streets and hanging lights during Christmas time. Harold Miller, the mayor of Weirton, emphasized just how integral the mill was to maintaining the city.
“It was a wonderful company to work for. I mean, it’s just, it was unbelievable, it was a fairytale. It was a one horse town, you know, and it just, so many businesses thrived off of Weirton Steel. We built a new hospital because of Weirton Steel,” he said.
Another part of the steel backbone was the tax base the company provided to Weirton. However, the company’s fiscal agreement with the city was much different than most businesses. Weirton Steel had an “in lieu of agreement” with the city in which, rather than being taxed on operations, they paid the city a lump sum of money at the end of the year. The mayor explained this would balance the city’s budget.
“So if the city in those days had a $12 million budget, $15 million budget, and they were short $2 million, then Weirton Steel would write a check for $2 million so they could balance their budget and continue to operate the facilities,” Miller said.
After Weirton Steel’s bankruptcy, the city placed more responsibility on the citizens to support the city’s budget. This came in the form of a 2004 municipal service fee of $2 a week for anyone working within city limits. In 2016, the city council passed a one percent sales tax to stack on top of West Virginia’s six percent sales tax. Still, these measures have failed to replace the financial hole left by Weirton Steel. There are people, though, who are trying to fill this gap.
One such person is Patrick Ford, the executive director of the Business Development Corporation of the Northern Panhandle, or BDC. Rather than focusing on one county, his organization uses a regional approach to help revitalize the valley’s economy.
Credit Ella Jennings
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Patrick Ford, Executive Director of the Business Development Corporation of the Northern Panhandle
In 2009, the BDC used a $200,000 grant provided by the U.S. Economic Development Administration to fund a development consultation by AECOM, a multinational engineering firm. The firm’s study identified five industries that they recommended the BDC should work to recruit to the area, which were energy, chemical, value added metals, transportation logistics, and healthcare.
Targeting these five industry clusters has so far proven fruitful for the BDC. The unemployment rate has fallen drastically in the northern panhandle. This past March, Hancock County’s unemployment rate reached a decade low of 5.3 percent, which was still trailing behind the national average of 3.8 percent. Patrick explained the Business Development Corporation’s efforts as well as other economic development organizations in the area have done a lot to bring jobs to the area.
“What we’ve been able to illustrate is that in our tri-county area, my counterpart in Jefferson County, Ohio, and the BDC, has added or preserved 7,500 jobs,” he said.
About 200 of these jobs were created when two international companies that produce equipment for the natural gas industry opened up manufacturing facilities in Weirton. They belong to a larger group of companies trying to capitalize on the natural gas boom that is redefining the landscape of the Northern Panhandle and north-central West Virginia.
Since 2005, more than 5,000 gas wells for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have been permitted in the state, according to a report by the Charleston Gazette-Mail’s collaboration with ProPublica. That’s because the region sits on top of enough natural gas to power all of West Virginia’s energy needs for decades.
One of the BDC’s current objectives is to help finalize the plan to build a petrochemical ethane cracker plant in Dilles Bottom, Ohio, about 40 miles down the river from Weirton.
Cracker plants get their name from their process. The plants take ethanol, a byproduct of natural gas extraction, and use extreme heat to crack its molecules. This creates ethylene, which is further processed into polyethylene, the feedstock for plastics and other chemicals. It’s what plastic grocery bags are made from, among thousands of other products.
This proposed plant, which would be owned and operated by a Thailand-based company called PTT Global Chemical, and the Shell Oil Company cracker plant already under construction in Monaca, Pennsylvania, represent nearly $20 billion dollars of possible investment and the creation of about 500 jobs at each site. Patrick said that this could lead to up to 20,000 spin-off jobs to service the people working at the cracker plants.
“For every petrochemical company job that we create, there’s going to be anywhere from two to four service jobs that are going to be created that’s going to service that one petrochemical job,” he said. “That’s 20,000 permanent jobs. Those are people that are working at the factories and those are the multipliers, permanent jobs. Back office, hospitality, restaurants, teachers.”
And, these two plants are pieces of a larger plan to develop a petrochemical corridor dubbed the Appalachian Storage and Trading Hub. The storage hub would entail a multi-billion-dollar investment of hundreds of miles of pipelines along the Ohio River connecting natural gas extraction wells with underground storage facilities and processing plants, like the ethane cracker plants.
A study by the American Chemistry Council predicts the hub could bring over 100,000 jobs to Appalachia. But these estimates all seem to exclude a very real phenomenon that is changing the nature of work as we know it: automation.
The Ohio Valley has already witnessed plenty of automation. For example, when the Basic Oxygen Plant was introduced at Weirton Steel in the late 60s, it allowed 200 tons of steel to be smelted in 25 minutes. This completely knocked out the need for open hearth furnaces, which took eight hours to do the same amount. With the help of computers, the BOP required less people and could get a lot more done, which plays into the larger story of manufacturing across the country: manufacturing employment has fallen significantly, yet productivity hasn’t slowed down.
Questions about automation give some policy analysts pause about doubling down on manufacturing investments in the region. Sean O’Leary is a senior policy analyst for the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy.
“We’re offering huge tax incentives or doing whatever we can to bring these industries in, and they’re going to come in and use resources and provide a fraction of the jobs that they did in the past,” O’Leary said. “Is that a great use of our tax dollars and our resources?”
And, just as automation has led to economic deserts throughout this area in the past, there’s a good chance it could again. With artificial intelligence and other technological advances, anything robots can do better than humans, they probably will. Jobs with routine and predictable tasks, such as those in production, food services, and transportation, will become further susceptible to having their labor done by robots.
A recent report by the Brookings Institute predicts that nearly a third of all jobs in the Weirton-Steubenville metro area are highly-susceptible to automation, meaning that 70 percent or more of the tasks completed at these jobs can be automated with technology available today. Rob Maxim, a co-author of this report and senior research analyst in the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings, said that while robots won’t eliminate all of the jobs in this high-risk category.
“What you would see, the vast majority of them, were able to be eliminated and you’d probably have a few workers basically overseeing, you know, the robots or the software where the pick and choose your kind of automation technology that would be doing the tasks instead,” he said.
And, Maxim explained that the multiplier effect, or the calculation used to estimate how many spinoff jobs will be created to service one high-paying, industrial job, doesn’t take automation into account.
“My impression of those analyses is, they tend to be good directional models, but I’m not aware of any kind of multiplier exercises that incorporate automation,” he said.
This means that the thousands of jobs that the Business Development Corporation and the American Chemistry Council predict to be created from the petrochemical industry could actually end up being far fewer than expected.
Additionally, it’s important to remember that the petrochemical industry is tied to a boom and bust cycle. This brings speculation around its long-term economic impacts on the area, as O’Leary explains.
“When you have your economy based on non-renewable resource that price fluctuates strongly,” he said. “If you’re going to have booms and busts and … eventually the well runs dry.”
Aside from automation, another part of the debate over the future of the Ohio Valley are the environmental impacts of the petrochemical industry. Pollution in the valley used to mean economic security. If smokestacks were billowing gray clouds and soot covered your front porch, your parents probably had a good paying job. But now, with the mills and plants offering less and less jobs, some residents are questioning if the economic benefits can outweigh the environmental costs.
I met with Beverly Reed, a lifelong resident of the Ohio Valley, at her family’s bicycle shop in Bridgeport, Ohio. Bridgeport is just across the river from Wheeling, West Virginia, and a little over 10 miles north of the proposed PTTG cracker plant.
Beverly is an intern for the Sierra Club, and works with the FreshWater Accountability Project as well as the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. All of these groups have a shared goal.
“The biggest thing we would like to do is to stop the PTT Global Petrochemical Complex from coming to Belmont County, Ohio,” she said.
Credit Ella Jennings
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Beverly Reed
Beverly is a registered nurse, and she said one of her primary concerns with the cracker plant is the effect it could have on the health of both humans and the environment.
Last year, the Ohio EPA granted the project an air pollution permit. It allows the proposed cracker to emit millions of tons of greenhouse gases each year. It would be like putting 365,000 cars on the road. The permit also allows for the emission of almost 400 tons of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, each year. VOCs are a group of gases that react with sunlight and nitrogen oxides to create ground-level ozone, or smog. Not all VOCs are detrimental to human health, but many are known carcinogens, such as benzene, which can leak from the valves and equipment used in cracker plants. Reed said that the Sierra Club and three other environmental groups are challenging this air permit.
“We’re appealing it because it was woefully inadequate and not protective of human health,” she said.
With only nine percent of plastic recycled worldwide, Beverly is also troubled by the plant’s possible contribution to an already established plastic crisis.
“It’s toxic. We don’t need more of it. It’s killing the oceans, it’s killing all the marine life. It’s killing us. It’s found everywhere,” Reed said.
Ultimately, even though the region desperately needs high-paying jobs, she doesn’t believe that this should be the path forward for the Ohio Valley.
“People think that this is going to be our knight in shining armor. It’s gonna bail us all out. We’re going to be thriving and everything, but that’s not going to be the case. It’s not plain and simple. It’s not,” she said. “It’s going to be short term economic gain while the plant’s being built.
Reed said she doesn’t believe the short-term economic boom is worth it.
“I mean, we’d probably see business in here, you know, but I don’t care, you know, my family doesn’t care,” she said. “We care more about future generations and the environment.”
There are many trajectories that the Ohio Valley could follow. One anticipates billions of dollars of investment, thousands of jobs and national importance, as there is only one other petrochemical hub in the United States. A lot of money and political power are backing this route, but its disregard for automation could leave its economic revival looking far less human than anticipated. And, the environmental factors involved make some afraid it could turn the area into a cancer alley. All of which are narratives and realities the Ohio Valley is already familiar with.
Another vision comes from the environmentalist standpoint, and sees the valley as a hub of green energy and localized farming. Yet, with a much smaller budget and a lack of political support, the puzzle of how to supply sustainable jobs for the valley is still one to be solved.
One truth that needs no speculation is that Weirton and the Ohio Valley deserve justice for its economic pain and suffering. No one will ever serve jail time for the mill shutdowns that led to a mass exodus from the area, broken families, and financially driven suicides. I’m not calling for some sort of retribution, but a question I continually asked myself throughout this series was, “why did we deserve this?” This same question is probably asked all across the American Heartland, as more and more people are left wondering how their prosperity came crashing to an end.
And yeah, I know, life isn’t fair. But there are reasons why mills close, and there are reasons why there are no safety nets for those who slip through the cracks.
What Are Your Hopes for Weirton?
Earlier this year, I went to the Festival of Nations at the Millsop Community Center in downtown Weirton. The very first festival started on May Day in 1934 during tense labor strife, as the mill’s management attempted to make peace with the workers following a strike the year before.
Credit Ella Jennings
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Traditional Indian dancers perform at the Festival of Nations
For several years, the festival served as a celebration of the many ethnic groups that came to town to work in the mill, but it died out during World War II. The Weirton Area Museum and Cultural Center brought it back in 2009, and ever since the gathering has brought together hundreds of Weirton citizens to celebrate their community once more.
The average age of the population in Weirton is about 46 years old, and it showed in the crowd. I only saw one other girl around my age, and she happened to be the daughter of one of the organizers. Still, the mood was lively as people enjoyed dancing from a range of groups, like Ukrainian folk dancers and traditional Indian ensembles.
Credit Ella Jennings
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Clemmie Frierson engaged in conversation at the Festival of Nations
My original plan was to stay for an hour, but the conversations I had kept me going until the food vendors were packing up. From young to old, everyone had an opinion about their hopes for the area. I wanted to end this episode by leading out with the voices of the people I spoke to, the voices of those from Weirton, a mill town in West Virginia.
(The following are direct quotes from attendees of the Festival of Nations in Weirton on March 16, 2019.)
Carrie Stephenson:
I am just hoping for a better community for our area and Weirton, West Virginia.
Jack Provenzano:
I hope they could go back to the old Weirton, what it used to be.
Susan Buteri:
I would like to see all the companies come back into Weirton.
Caleb Owen:
I’m hoping that since they just took down the steel mill, they actually turn that into something that can kind of like, you know, bring some entertainment to the town.
Emalee Hbizdak:
I just hope we’re going to keep going like in the right direction. More jobs and more community like activities and stuff. Get people involved.
Tonya Parker:
If they can bring something into that area that will create jobs for this area, that would be a good thing, in my opinion.
Ernest Nicholas Sr.:
We shall continue to grow up. We’ll come back to life. We’ve got the right people and we will prosper.
Janet Barbario:
Yeah, we’d like more businesses to come to the area. So many kids can only work at Mcdonald’s, you know.
Missy Mikula:
I’m hoping to see revitalization here in town now that we’ve lost our Weirton Steel. So, we hope to see new industries coming in and certainly new housing, we need it.
Linda Stear:
My hopes for Weirton are that it’ll continue to grow and we’ll see a lot of growth in jobs and housing and just the future looks pretty bright right now for the Weirton community. And we’re pretty happy about it.
Makenzie Stear:
My hopes are for Weirton, well, that we expand and we try to clean up downtown.
Diana Magnone:
I would really like them to do things to bring back the millennials and the Gen Xers to have them have a reason to come back. Um, one thing that may help that is more of a build up things like green spaces.
Kalpana Gupta:
With the steel mill going down, the only way to replace it is to have new businesses come in.
Sneha Gupta
Having people realize that the people of Weirton actually have a lot to offer, too. Yeah, I think, I think it’s, it’s looking like a bright, bright future.
Clemmie Frierson:
I’m upset because I like the city council. But there’s no females, there’s no people of color on the city council. I’m on the board of transportation as a director. I’m the only person of color and it bothers me that they’re not really reaching out to the community the way they should. So like in terms of Weirton, Weirton could grow. But they need the input from a different set of people.
Gaetano Provenzano:
I like the idea of diversity in the valley as the valley continues to grow.
John McCugh:
I think, speak honestly, I think a lot of people in this town need to realize progression and change is good. So, let loose of what we were in the 70s and let’s move into the future.
Dan Greathouse
I expect a lot of great things to happen to Weirton over the next five years. I see us growing.
Rachel English:
I would like to see the valley come alive again.
Colton Kolanko:
My hopes for Weirton are that, everyone can, I guess, achieve their pursuit of happiness, whatever that may be. And that… everyone has the opportunity, I guess that they deserve, because everyone deserves opportunities. Even Weirton, even the small town of Weirton.
